Sciences et Société Unies pour un autre Développement
MSH SUD is a place of scientific animation and research on major contemporary challenges, in particular socio-environmental crises and transitions. Open to all, it ensures neutrality, fairness and trust between partners from all disciplines, academic and non-academic.
It offers a space for support and incubation to encourage dialogue, the design of innovative methodologies and reflection on the research process. It is also a place to support the dynamics of co-research (exploratory projects, interdisciplinarity and translation towards public and associative actors).
Global changes (particularly climatic, ecological and demographic changes) are generating strong uncertainties and new risks, both individual and collective, for social actors. These risks are at the crossroads of the health, agriculture, food and biodiversity conservation sectors. They result from the intensification of the agricultural sector and the transformation of food systems, the globalization of production chains, the erosion of biodiversity, the scarcity of natural resources and climate change. They are inseparable from the economic, social and political choices that are made at the territorial level, in an interlocking of scales of national and international governance.
These strong uncertainties call on us to find new ways of conceiving our research systems and their ambitions, by closely associating actors from the territories and the “third research sector”.
Bringing together researchers and all the actors of a territory to collaborate in a research-action approach to identify solutions to their problems in a systemic way is essential to understand the ins and outs of the problems that arise and to provide solutions. Such an approach makes sense in the context of the ecological and social transitions but requires, for its design and implementation, rigorous theoretical and methodological frameworks, involving all sciences in co-construction processes.
In the context of the New Research Programming Law: dissemination towards and cooperation with, for and by society, implements mechanisms to better understand the complexity of socio-environmental issues and the challenges of transitions with their health, social, environmental, educational, energy, digital issues. In this perspective, the reinforcement of the processes of co-research between academic actors and the “third sector of research” in the Occitanie region is a priority, especially in support of the Regional Plan for Higher Education and Research and Innovation (SRESRI).
The scientific project of MSH SUD is based on three main pillars
Developing a broader concept of interdisciplinarity (at the interface between the humanities and the social sciences, environmental sciences, engineering sciences, etc.) in support of the emergence of new approaches to research.
Identifying interfaces between sciences and society: translating social demands into research questions through participatory and collaborative approaches with social actors (communities, associations, citizen groups, etc.).
Questioning from a technical, epistemological, legal and ethical point of view the production, management and use of research data in the framework of an open science policy.
MSH SUD
UPVM - Site Saint-Charles
71 rue Professeur Henri Serre
34090 MONTPELLIER